The Dialects of the Tribe provides an overview of the various schools of poetry that developed during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. It provides insights into the methods, concerns, and poems of many of the prominent poets of the period, and a critical assessment of the development of contemporary poetic movements including the most recent, Neoformalism, which brought a return of prosodic concerns from the hinterlands of anti-intellectualism to which formal poetry had been exiled during the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, though the egocentric ‘seventies and into the greedy ‘eighties. Lewis Putnam Turco, perhaps the most respected poet-critic in the United States, is the author of more than fifty chapbooks, monographs, and books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction over more than a half-century including The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which has been called 'The poet's bible' by several generations of American teachers and poets since its first edition in 1968 and through its fourth edition in 2011.The poet and critic James Dickey said in an unsolicited endorsement in 1986 that it 'Belongs in the hands of every poet, student, and teacher, for the greater good of the art.'
